Exciting news – a new publication!

23Aug

Some long-term readers of this blog will already know that one of my side-projects (apart from running the odd marathon) has been a seven-year research project on Iris Murdoch. I finally got it finished over the summer, had it read by a couple of lovely people from the Iris Murdoch Society and a good friend who is also a senior academic, and I’ve had it printed up and made it available via Amazon worldwide in both print and e-book versions. Any of my book groups which are still in existence have been offered and have received e-book versions, copies of the print version will be available to buy at the upcoming Iris Murdoch Society Conference, and I’m very relieved it’s done and dusted.

“Iris Murdoch and the Common Reader” looks at reading groups in the UK and US and whether one of Murdoch’s mid-20th-century novels would make a good reading book read. Based on Reception Theory and Death of the Author, I reclaim Murdoch from the academy and the critics and return her squarely into the domain of what my reading groups preferred to call the ‘ordinary’ reader.

7 years. Quite a project. My project in 2016 was to do a little writing. Some times a page a day, sometimes two, skip a few days , get back to it , skip a week and then write and write and write. I filled 5 spiral binder notebooks. Took 11 months. I hand wrote the entire New Testament of the Bible. Current project is to redo my 500 cartoon sketch bank. For future publication effort they must be corrected from horizontal or vertical rectangles and others being odd sized nearly square shaped to perfect squares so not to have irregular margins (gutters) for next publishing attempt. My old odd sizes required a different set up page for each which was very expensive. The new cartoons will be uniform on each page just like text. The drawings will be improved and new color choices made. It will take me at least 2 years if I can do 1 and 1/2 or so a day.

Goodness me, that is a project! Mine was very part time, fitted around my paid work, volunteering, reading and blogging about books, etc., etc., with progress every two years when there was a Conference to present at! It’s odd not having it hanging over me now, to be honest!